A number of the practices that the Anglican Church in North America’s proposed service book, The Book of Common Prayer 2019, reintroduces into the Anglican Church are not the practices of the early Church but later medieval developments. Even the doctrine that associated with the practices which may be genuinely considered primitive, having origins in New Testament and early apostolic times, is medieval. They are practices that were omitted from the 1552 Prayer Book through the 1892 American Prayer Book and later Prayer Books for Scriptural and theological reasons. They are the kind of practices that if they were found in a service book, it was an unauthorized one such as the Anglican Missal. A few might be found in a Book of Occasional Services. A Book of Occasional Services does not serve as a doctrinal or worship standard for an Anglican jurisdiction. Churches are not required to use the forms in a Book of Occasional Services. Their use is discretionary.
The inclusion of such practices in the proposed BCP 2019 indicates that their inclusion serves doctrinal purposes. If a practice is incorporated into a Prayer Book, any doctrine that is associated with the practice becomes a part of the doctrine of the Prayer Book even though the practice may be optional.
When you have devoted thirty-five odd years of your life to the study of Prayer Books and liturgy as I have, you are immediately struck by the unreformed Catholic doctrine of the proposed BCP 2019. It leaps off the page. I do not believe that I am inaccurate in describing the proposed book as a “party book.” The proposed book embodies the doctrine of one particular wing of the Anglican Church in North America. It is not a book that was designed to comprehend all the theological schools of thought represented in the ACNA.
While the proposed BCP 2019 may include practices that are associated with the worship renewal movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries , these practices are not incompatible with the doctrine of the book. Otherwise I do not believe that they would have been included in the book.
The inclusion of a number of the practices found in the proposed BCP 2019 was justified on the rather flimsy grounds that they are also found in the 1549 Prayer Book, the first Prayer Book of Edward VI. The 1549 Prayer Book was barely-reformed. Bishop Stephen Gardiner who was no friend of the English Reformation embraced the 1549 Prayer Book. He had not objections to its Communion Service because the service, as he pointed to the attention of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, gave expression to the medieval Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and Eucharistic sacrifice. The purpose of the 1549 Prayer Book was to ease the transition from a Latin liturgy to an English liturgy. It was not meant to be a permanent liturgy for the Church of England. Its purpose certainly was not to set the standard for later Prayer Books.
Liturgical commissions that have sought to move their jurisdiction in a more unreformed Catholic direction have adopted the 1549 Prayer Book as their model for a revised Prayer Book. They have modeled the Prayer of Consecration for the revised Communion Service on the 1549 Canon. The Prayer of Consecration of the Alternative Order for the Administration of the Holy Communion of the 1928 Proposed English Prayer Book is a good example. For the same reason the ACNA’s Prayer Book and Liturgy Task Force used the 1549 Canon as the model of the proposed BCP 2019’s Standard Anglican Prayer of Consecration (ignoring the fact that if the Anglican Church has a standard Prayer of Consecration, it is the 1552 Prayer of Consecration.) As well as being open to an unreformed Catholic interpretation, it is a tediously long prayer in comparison with the consecration prayers modeled on the 1552 Prayer of Consecration such as the consecration prayer of Common Prayer: Resources for Gospel-Shaped Gatherings’s Service of the Lord’s Supper Form 1.
The 1552 Communion Service made the communion of the people the high point of the service. The proposed 2019 forms of Holy Communion make the priest’s consecration of the elements and their elevation and showing to the people for adoration the high point of the service as did the medieval Catholic Mass. Unlike the 1549 Communion Service, the proposed 2019 forms of Holy Communion do not prohibit the priest from elevating and showing the consecrated elements to the people for adoration. They provide two formulas—one from the Byzantine Rite and the other from the Roman Rite, which the priest may use when showing the consecrated elements to the people. Their use is optional but their inclusion in these forms must be considered in an appraisal of the doctrine of the proposed 2019 BCP.
For Anglicans Ablaze readers who are involved in the Anglican Church in North America, who identify themselves as Protestants, and who have a high regard for the Holy Scriptures, the historic Anglican formularies, and historic Anglicanism, I have several questions.
How does it feel to be a part of a church whose leaders are seeking to impose an unreformed Catholic catechism and service book on the church and to make it unreformed Catholic in doctrine, ecclesiology, and practice? How does it feel to be expected to accommodate the Anglo-Catholic wing of the church and to receive nothing in return? Do you feel welcome? Do you feel accepted? Do you feel wanted? Be honest with yourself. How does it make you feel?
If you are unhappy with developments in the Anglican Church in North America, it is not going to help to hide your unhappiness. It is not going to help to sit on it. It is not going to help to pretend that things are better than they are really are. Sooner or later something that you cannot ignore will happen. The best way to deal with your unhappiness is to take action—to work with others who share your concerns, to put your heads together as my mother would say, and come up with workable solutions to what you identify as problems. Doing nothing in the long run will only make you unhappier.
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